Part 1

Generally a year didn’t seem like it could take her, or her name, away.

It couldn’t force her to sleep with money, papers, passports or documents.

In bed, as her arm arches for the light switch in the icy room, she thinks she sees birds’ wings hovering above her hot breath.

But now she sees the heavy boots and shadows in the hall.

Hours ago she had been in the yard hanging Japanese lanterns in the sparse evergreen.

She had been arranging wood in the Mexican fire pit.

The children were playing with Ukrainian dolls sent by her mother.

Her coffee was from Colombia.

Her lunch was from a diner down the road.

The huge world fit into her small life.

Part II

Generally a year can’t make people tearful when the window of time is opened.

Until the year claims the normal of the usual and the expected of the known.

There are reverberations as the warm breakfasts, the salty ocean, neighbors, the harlequin foothills, sleeping children, and people’s livelihoods are snatched away.

They became hauntings, history will say a hundred years later.

Gone like a red roof in a gray-blasting tornado,

gone like a friend sent to war,

gone like the re-hemmed wedding dress that no longer has a purpose.

All over the country and in homes where women and children escaped violence, there are vanishings.

The sages have gathered light years away.

The earth’s night seems to hang over the cities and bridged rivers and farms, glistening like chards of frozen water and launching warning lights back to the watchers.

On satellite and drone and allies’ intelligence images, it looks like organized chaos. In reality, it is cruelty.

Part III

Other years rang in differently, she remembered.

They were as memorable as a mix of friends — savoring pears and cheeses, sweet dates and spinach pies, and meringues with chocolate and wine — indulging and dancing hours after midnight.

But this is not the taste in her mouth today.

There is now a dense dryness

as the dreamers are subdued.

It is winter.

The mice have taken food below the house, and the berries are trampled under the snow.

The wheelbarrow behind the house where her father stored it had tempted her regularly to go gather branches for the fire pit.

Generally a year can’t change everything everywhere for every person in every place on every day of every week and for evermore.

Until the good turns upside down indefinitely.

Part IV

Then comes the years that can do that.

The words are all flares;

Trust is rusted;

And lips burn when others kiss them;

Infants cry in the night like they are alarms.

And people go by church pantries to leave food for the immigrants or

friends say they’ll take someone in if a life can be rebuilt.

And no one knows what to say other than the next 365 days have to be better.

Because this (whatever we dare to see) could not be intended to have been the best of us.

We all are the glowing of endless embers when the stream dies or freezes over and the sky is starless.

We all just want to make it back to that former earth we knew and climb warmly into her lap.

And we all just want the godlessness to end.